Vision Language Models (VLMs) have recently been leveraged to generate robotic actions, forming Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, directly adapting a pretrained VLM for robotic control remains challenging, particularly when constrained by a limited number of robot demonstrations. In this work, we introduce LLaRA: Large Language and Robotics Assistant, a framework that formulates robot action policy as visuo-textual conversations and enables an efficient transfer of a pretrained VLM into a powerful VLA, motivated by the success of visual instruction tuning in Computer Vision. First, we present an automated pipeline to generate conversation-style instruction tuning data for robots from existing behavior cloning datasets, aligning robotic actions with image pixel coordinates. Further, we enhance this dataset in a self-supervised manner by defining six auxiliary tasks, without requiring any additional action annotations. We show that a VLM finetuned with a limited amount of such datasets can produce meaningful action decisions for robotic control. Through experiments across multiple simulated and real-world tasks, we demonstrate that LLaRA achieves state-of-the-art performance while preserving the generalization capabilities of large language models. The code, datasets, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/LostXine/LLaRA.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently become the state-of-the-art across many computer vision tasks. In contrast to convolutional networks (CNNs), ViTs enable global information sharing even within shallow layers of a network, i.e., among high-resolution features. However, this perk was later overlooked with the success of pyramid architectures such as Swin Transformer, which show better performance-complexity trade-offs. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient add-on component (termed GrafT) that considers global dependencies and multi-scale information throughout the network, in both high- and low-resolution features alike. It has the flexibility of branching out at arbitrary depths and shares most of the parameters and computations of the backbone. GrafT shows consistent gains over various well-known models which includes both hybrid and pure Transformer types, both homogeneous and pyramid structures, and various self-attention methods. In particular, it largely benefits mobile-size models by providing high-level semantics. On the ImageNet-1k dataset, GrafT delivers +3.9%, +1.4%, and +1.9% top-1 accuracy improvement to DeiT-T, Swin-T, and MobViTXXS, respectively. Our code and models are at https://github.com/jongwoopark7978/Grafting-Vision-Transformer.

3D visual perception tasks based on multi-camera images are essential for autonomous driving systems. The latest work in this field performs 3D object detection by leveraging multi-view images as an input and iteratively enhancing object queries (object proposals) by cross-attending multi-view features. However, individual backbone features are not updated with multi-view features, and it stays as a mere collection of the output of the single-image backbone network. Therefore we propose 3M3D: A Multi-view, Multi-path, Multi-representation for 3D Object Detection where we update both multi-view features and query features to enhance the representation of the scene in both fine panoramic view and coarse global view. Firstly, we update multi-view features by multi-view axis self-attention. It will incorporate panoramic information in the multi-view features and enhance understanding of the global scene. Secondly, we update multi-view features by self-attention of the Region of Interest (ROI) windows which encodes local finer details in the features. It will help exchange the information not only along the multi-view axis but also along the other spatial dimension. Lastly, we leverage the fact of the multi-representation of queries (MRQ) in different domains to further boost performance. Here we use sparse floating queries along with dense Bird’s Eye View (BEV) queries, which are later post-processed to filter duplicate detections. Moreover, we show performance improvements on the nuScenes benchmark dataset [1] on top of our baselines.